London Is the Best City in America by Laura Dave Page A

the Moynihan-Richardses in our basement.
    When Josh walked up the stairs, someone called out, “There he is!” and everyone stood up and clapped, continuing with cheers as he went around the table saying hello. Berringer and I stood off to the side.
    And I would have kept standing to the side, except I was noticed by my father, who at the head of the table was holding center court. He saluted me, and I saluted back. Samuel Bean Everett, Esq.: volunteer firefighter, Savannah, Georgia, native, six-foot-four anomaly. He had come tonight fully bachelor-partied out in construction pants, work boots, and a T-shirt Josh had bought him a few years back that read MR. SMOOTH LIVES HERE in large black letters.
    Even from several feet away, I could see that tonight’s festivities were affecting him. His cheeks were already red, his eyes watery. My dad rarely drank—a by-product, I always assumed, of being married to Sadie the teetotaler. I hadn’t known my mother to have a drink, in fact, even once over the span of my lifetime. This was a little ironic when you considered that she met my dad at a bar. On a Sunday morning, nevertheless.
    It was one of the stories that made the rounds—over and over—wedding weekend or not. The story of that New Year’s Day morning spent at the Oak Bar—on the bottom floor of the New York Plaza. My mom and her friend Lydia were sitting at a corner table, drinking Shirley Temples. It had been Lydia’s idea to go there as a way to kill a little time before the matinee they were seeing that afternoon. Enter my father. He had forgotten his newspaper at that very table, and was racing across the woody room to retrieve it. This was when she spotted him wearing “ripped dungarees” and his hair in a short ponytail. He was just passing through New York on his way from his home in Savannah, Georgia, to an island off the coast of Maine, where he was going to be a firefighter and coach high school basketball. He asked her to reach under the table and hand his paper back to him.
    And in response, my mother, in an act that she maintains was completely unlike her, asked him to sit back down for just a minute and join them for another Shirley Temple. This baby-faced guy, who was pale-skinned and very southern and bright-blue-eyed, and who called her miss when he asked for his paper back and who wasn’t anything like the guy that she thought she’d end up with: not wealthy or ambitious or Jewish. Not even Jewish.
    While they were waiting for his drink to arrive—the story goes—she excused herself and went into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall and cried because she knew she’d never be okay without him.
    Then she washed her face and checked her reflection in the mirror and went back outside and asked him to stay with her in New York and reconsider what he wanted to do with his life and let her raise the children the religion she needed to and marry her one day. Or, just to stay.
    “Emmy!” My father screamed to me now. “What are you doing over there? Come over here. I want to kiss you hello, little beauty.”
    I hated when he called me little beauty. How had he turned out six-four, and his only daughter five-three? I looked at Berringer to see if he heard, but he was wrapped up in a conversation with the high school boys and had forgotten all about me.
    I headed over to my father. “What’s going on?” I said, as he leaned down and gave me a hug hello.
    He pointed to his shirt. “The guys nicknamed me Mr. Smooth. Isn’t that something?”
    “It’s something,” I said.
    He looked down at his shirt, running his finger along the MR. SMOOTH. “It is something.”
    I delivered my mother’s brief message that she was going to bed, and he looked up at me, more than a little worried at what I’d said, like he had maybe done something wrong, which he hadn’t. It was just that they were rarely apart. That was the thing about my parents. They were still so much in love. Thirty-plus years